The Film
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is a genuine marvel.
Its gorgeous, comic book-inspired animation style is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Its story provides a fantastically imaginative and inspired way of revisiting and re-inventing the Spider-Man mythology while being both reverential to and lovingly cheeky about the lore.
It’s energetic, visceral, funny, confident and flat out entertaining from start to finish. There isn’t so much as a single missed beat or wasted frame of animation. In fact, so much is going on visually and narratively that you’ll have to watch the film multiple times to take in every nuance, gag or reference on offer.
Best of all, despite being an animated movie that’s not afraid to creep into the realm of the surreal from time to time, it really delivers on its empowering ‘anyone can wear the mask’ theme.
Release Details
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment/Marvel Studios
Release Details: Region-free 4K Blu-ray, region A/B/C HD Blu-ray, Movies Anywhere Digital Movie code
Extra features: Commentary track with the writers and producers; ‘alternative universe’ playback mode featuring inserted, rough-drawn deleted scenes and unfinished ideas; Spider-ham short film; selection of featurettes covering: the animation style, the film’s ‘easter eggs’, the gestation of the story, the voice actors, the look of the different spider-verse heroes and villains, and the work of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; a pair of lyric music videos
Best audio system: Dolby Atmos
Video options: HDR10
Peak mastering brightness: 4000 nits
Key kit used for this review: Oppo UDP-205 4K Blu-ray player, Samsung QN65Q90R TV, LG OLED55B8, Panasonic UB900 4K Blu-ray player
Picture quality
As anyone who saw Spider-Verse at the cinema would hope, the picture quality of this 4K Blu-ray release is sensational.
The transfer’s aggressive use of 4K Blu-ray’s wide color and high dynamic range technologies (the disc is mastered to peaks of 4000 nits rather than the more common 1000) ensures that the stunning animation absolutely explodes off your screen – leaving the standard dynamic range, HD Blu-ray looking pale and drab by comparison. So long, anyway, as you have a TV bright enough to do the 4K transfer’s nits some sort of justice.
The brightest highlights, for instance, such as car headlights, daylight streaming through windows, gleams in the characters’ eyes, and the rampant kaleidoscope of colors cast off by Kingpin’s dimension rupturing machine all look phenomenally intense.
Even better, the average brightness level the image deploys is fantastically high – especially during the frenetic, dimension-crossing final showdown with Kingpin. Yet unlike some aggressively mastered 4K Blu-ray releases, the brightness never overwhelms or over-stretches any of the gorgeous use of color that’s really this release’s greatest suit. Rather the intense brightness always feels like it’s at the service of the expanded color palette.
In other words, the HDR brightness actually makes colors feel more rather than less natural, and brings out more subtleties of tone and texture (leading to a more three-dimensional effect perfectly suited to the film’s ‘pencil-shaded’ style) rather than causing subtle details to be crushed or clipped away.
It’s not just the brightness and color saturation that makes the 4K Blu-ray such a sight to behold, though. The expanded dynamic range extends down to some beautifully rich, deep but also detail-packed black levels.
Resplendent, too, is the 4K Blu-ray’s level of detail. It’s forensic, for instance, in the way it brings out every last trace of the beautiful cross hatch shading technique that give the film its unique look. It also increases your admiration even more for just how much work has gone into the film’s often layered, fast-changing backgrounds – especially during the final fight.
The intense sharpness and detail is delivered without any grain or noise either, making its impact all the more immediate.
For all its magnificence, there is one complaint to level at the Spider-Verse 4K Blu-ray release: its lack of support for either the Dolby Vision or HDR10+ dynamic HDR formats.
These add scene by scene information to the HDR data stream, helping TVs do a better job of rendering pictures – and it’s worth remembering that Sony/Marvel managed to deliver a nice Dolby Vision master on the 4K Blu-ray of Spider-Man: Homecoming.
While I’d have loved to see what Dolby Vision might have brought to the Spider-Verse, though, unlike the slightly lackluster picture of the recently reviewed Captain America: The First Avenger 4K Blu-ray, the Spider-Verse looks so gorgeous as it is on 4K Blu-ray that not buying it because it doesn’t have Dolby Vision would ultimately be cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Sound quality
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’s (exclusive to the 4K Blu-ray) Dolby Atmos mix is as spectacular on your ears as its visuals are on your eyes.
For starters, it’s loud. Be it a train hurtling through dimensions, those dimensions tearing at the fabric of the city, a massive explosion, one of Kingpin’s killer punches or one of the bass-heavy songs that punctuate the action, the Atmos mix delivers it with the sort of room-filling authority and power that passes through your guts and rattles your teeth.
The mix is not just about raw power, though. On the contrary, what makes the power so effective is that it’s used to unlock dense layers of effects, scoring and and sharp transitions with so much clarity that it’s almost overwhelming at times. Almost, but never completely.
All of the Atmos channels – including the height ones – are so imaginatively that it’s occasionally hard for your brain to keep up with the audio cues it’s being presented with. As the multi-dimensional ‘pulse’ runs through the city, for instance, the effect is supported by a dramatic mix effect so startling that it takes a few seconds to appreciate just how perfect it was.
This level of detail in the mix makes the mix thrilling without being tiring, slightly exposing the fatiguingly relentless nature of the recently reviewed Mortal Engines 4K Blu-ray Atmos mix.
The Spider-Verse soundtrack’s density is so extreme, at times, that I could imagine some subtle effects and even some voices getting a little lost on relatively under-powered Atmos sound systems. But that’s not something you can fairly blame the mix for!
Extra Features
There are two features on the 4K Blu-ray: a commentary track and a short film featuring Spider-Ham.
The commentary features no less than five of the writing, directing and production crew. They’re all in a room together for the commentary, rather than being edited together from disparate locations. This makes for a light and bantery atmosphere, but slightly limits the amount of background information you get as the film unfolds. Overall, though, there’s enough insight and humor to make the commentary worth your time.
I had high hopes for the Spider-Ham mini movie given how great his character is in the main film. Unfortunately, though, I found it almost painfully unfunny.
Moving over to the Blu-ray for the rest of the extras, things take a turn for the better right away with the option to play the film in Alternative Universe mode. This plays the film embellished with extra scenes and ideas delivered, usually, in a rough ‘pencil art’ render.
There are just enough of these extra Alternative Universe snippets to justify your time. Though it’s a shame the feature isn’t available with the 4K version of the film.
The HD Blu-ray also delivers a solid selection of featurettes. These cover: The choice of telling the Miles Spider-Man story while also incorporating the other Spider characters; the creation of the comic book look of the animation; the voice casting; the process of designing all the different Spider characters in the film; the process of designing all the villains in the film; a short but worthwhile little featurette about the legendary comic book work of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; a fun guide to some of the countless ‘Easter Eggs’ in the film; and a couple of lyric videos.
Verdict
Despite not sporting a Dolby Vision master, the Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse 4K Blu-ray is a must buy. Its picture quality is spectacular even without dynamic metadata to help it out, its Dolby Atmos soundtrack is an energetic joy, and even the extra features try harder than those you get usually get with animated films.
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